by Frank Norris
Lloyd took up Dr. Street’s letter, and, holding it delicately at arm’s length, tore it in two and let the pieces flutter to the floor.
“That, for my life-work,” said Lloyd Searight.
As she drew back from him an instant later Bennett all at once and very earnestly demanded:
“Lloyd, do you love me?”
“With all my heart, Ward.”
“And you will be my wife?”
“You know that I will.”
“Then” — Bennett picked up the little volume of “Arctic Research” which he had received that morning, and tossed it from him upon the floor— “that, for my career,” he answered.
For a moment they were silent, looking gladly into each other’s eyes. Then Bennett drew her to him again and held her close to him, and once more she put her arms around his neck and nestled her head down upon his shoulder with a little comfortable sigh of contentment and relief and quiet joy, for that the long, fierce trial was over; that there were no more fights to be fought, no more grim, hard situations to face, no more relentless duties to be done. She had endured and she had prevailed; now her reward was come. Now for the long, calm years of happiness.
Later in the day, about an hour after noon, Bennett took his daily nap, carefully wrapped in shawls and stretched out in a wicker steamer-chair in the glass-room. Lloyd, in the meantime, was busy in the garden at the side of the house, gathering flowers which she intended to put in a huge china bowl in Bennett’s room. While she was thus occupied Adler, followed by Kamiska, came up. Adler pulled off his cap.
“I beg pardon, Miss,” he began, turning his cap about between his fingers. “I don’t want to seem to intrude, and if I do I just guess you’d better tell me so first off. But what did he say — or did he say anything — the captain, I mean — this morning about going up again? I heard you talking to him at breakfast. That’s it, that’s the kind of talk he needs. I can’t talk that talk to him. I’m so main scared of him. I wouldn’t ‘a’ believed the captain would ever say he’d give up, would ever say he was beaten. But, Miss, I’m thinking as there’s something wrong, main wrong with the captain these days besides fever. He’s getting soft — that’s what he is. If you’d only know the man that he was — before — while we was up there in the Ice! That’s his work, that’s what he’s cut out for. There ain’t nobody can do it but him, and to see him quit, to see him chuck up his chance to a third-rate ice-pilot like Duane — a coastwise college professor that don’t know no more about Ice than — than you do — it regularly makes me sick. Why, what will become of the captain now if he quits? He’ll just settle down to an ordinary stay-at-home, write-in-a-book professor, and write articles for the papers and magazines, and bye-and-bye, maybe, he’ll get down to lecturing! Just fancy, Miss, him, the captain, lecturing! And while he stays at home and writes, and — oh, Lord! — lectures, somebody else, without a fifth of his ability, will do the work. It’ll just naturally break my heart, it will!” exclaimed Adler, “if the captain chucks. I wouldn’t be so main sorry that he won’t reach the Pole as that he quit trying — as that a man like the captain — or like what I thought he was — gave up and chucked when he could win.”
“But, Adler,” returned Lloyd, “the captain — Mr. Bennett, it seems to me, has done his share. Think what he’s been through. You can’t have forgotten the march to Kolyuchin Bay?”
But Adler made an impatient gesture with the hand that held the cap. “The danger don’t figure; what he’d have to go through with don’t figure; the chances of life or death don’t figure; nothing in the world don’t figure. It’s his work; God A’mighty cut him out for that, and he’s got to do it. Ain’t you got any influence with him, Miss? Won’t you talk good talk to him? Don’t let him chuck; don’t let him get soft. Make him be a Man and not a professor.”
When Adler had left her Lloyd sank into a little seat at the edge of the garden walk, and let the flowers drop into her lap, and leaned back in her place, wide-eyed and thoughtful, reviewing in her imagination the events of the past few months. What a change that summer had brought to both of them; how they had been shaped anew in the mould of circumstance!
Suddenly and without warning, they two, high-spirited, strong, determined, had clashed together, the man’s force against the woman’s strength; and the woman, inherently weaker, had been crushed and humbled. For a time it seemed to her that she had been broken beyond hope; so humbled that she could never rise again; as though a great crisis had developed in her life, and that, having failed once, she must fail again, and again, and again — as if her whole subsequent life must be one long failure. But a greater crisis had followed hard upon the heels of the first — the struggle with self, the greatest struggle of all. Against the abstract principle of evil the woman who had failed in the material conflict with a masculine, masterful will, had succeeded, had conquered self, had been true when it was easy to be false, had dared the judgment of her peers so only that she might not deceive.
Her momentary, perhaps fancied, hatred of Bennett, who had so cruelly misunderstood and humiliated her, had apparently, of its own accord, departed from her heart. Then had come the hour when the strange hazard of fortune had reversed their former positions, when she could be masterful while he was weak; when it was the man’s turn to be broken, to be prevailed against. Her own discomfiture had been offset by his. She no longer need look to him as her conqueror, her master. And when she had seen him so weak, so pathetically unable to resist the lightest pressure of her hand; when it was given her not only to witness but to relieve his suffering, the great love for him that could not die had returned. With the mastery of self had come the forgetfulness of self; and her profession, her life-work, of which she had been so proud, had seemed to her of small concern. Now she was his, and his life was hers. She should — so she told herself — be henceforward happy in his happiness, and her only pride would be the pride in his achievements.
But now the unexpected had happened, and Bennett had given up his career. During the period of Bennett’s convalescence Lloyd had often talked long and earnestly with him, and partly from what he had told her and partly from much that she inferred she had at last been able to trace out and follow the mental processes and changes through which Bennett had passed. He, too, had been proved by fire; he, too, had had his ordeal, his trial.
By nature, by training, and by virtue of the life he lived Bennett had been a man, harsh, somewhat brutal, inordinately selfish, and at all times magnificently arrogant. He had neither patience nor toleration for natural human weakness. While selfish, he was not self-conscious, and it never occurred to him, it was impossible for him to see that he was a giant among men. His heart was callous; his whole nature and character hard and flinty from the buffetings he gave rather than received.
Then had come misfortune. Ferriss had died, and Bennett’s recognition and acknowledgment of the fact that he, Ward Bennett, who never failed, who never blundered, had made at last the great and terrible error of his life, had shaken his character to its very foundations. This was only the beginning; the breach once made, Humanity entered into the gloomy, waste places of his soul; remorse crowded hard upon his wonted arrogance; generosity and the impulse to make amends took the place of selfishness; kindness thrust out the native brutality; the old-time harshness and imperiousness gave way to a certain spirit of toleration.
It was the influence of these new emotions that had moved Bennett to make the statement to Adler that had so astonished and perplexed his old-time subordinate. He, Bennett, too, like Lloyd, was at that time endeavouring to free himself from a false position, and through the medium of confession stand in his true colours in the eyes of his associates. Unconsciously they were both working out their salvation along the same lines.
Then had come Bennett’s resolve to give Ferriss the conspicuous and prominent place in his book, the account of the expedition. The more Bennett dwelt upon Ferriss’s heroism, intelligence, and ability the more his task
became a labour of love, and the more the idea of self dropped away from his thought and imagination. Then — and perhaps this was not the least important factor in Bennett’s transformation — sickness had befallen; the strong and self-reliant man had been brought to the weakness of a child, whom the pressure of a finger could control. He suddenly changed places with the woman he believed he had, at such fearful cost, broken and subdued. His physical strength, once so enormous, was as a reed in the woman’s hand; his will, so indomitable, was as powerless as an infant’s before the woman’s calm resolve, rising up there before him and overmastering him at a time he believed it to be forever weakened.
Bennett had come forth from the ordeal chastened, softened, and humbled. But he was shattered, broken, brought to the earth with sorrow and the load of unavailing regret. Ambition was numb and lifeless within him. Reaction from his former attitude of aggression and defiance had carried him far beyond the normal.
Here widened the difference between the man and the woman. Lloyd’s discontinuance of her life-work had been in the nature of heroic subjugation of self. Bennett’s abandonment of his career was hardly better than weakness. In the one it had been renunciation; in the other surrender. In the end, and after all was over, it was the woman who remained the stronger.
But for her, the woman, was it true that all was over? Had the last conflict been fought? Was it not rather to be believed that life was one long conflict? Was it not for her, Lloyd, to rouse that sluggard ambition? Was not this her career, after all, to be his inspiration, his incentive, to urge him to the accomplishment of a great work? Now, of the two, she was the stronger. In these new conditions what was her duty? Adler’s clumsy phrases persisted in her mind. “That’s his work,” Adler had said. “God Almighty cut him out for that, and he’s got to do it. Don’t let him chuck, don’t let him get soft; make him be a man and not a professor.”
Had she so much influence over Bennett? Could she rouse the restless, daring spirit again? Perhaps; but what would it mean for her — for her, who must be left behind to wait, and wait, and wait — for three years, for five years, for ten years — perhaps forever? And now, at this moment, when she believed that at last happiness had come to her; when the duty had been done, the grim problems solved; when sickness had been overcome; when love had come back, and the calm, untroubled days seemed lengthening out ahead, there came to her recollection the hideous lapse of time that had intervened between the departure of the Freja and the expedition’s return; what sleepless nights, what days of unspeakable suspense, what dreadful alternations between hope and despair, what silent, repressed suffering, what haunting, ever-present dread of a thing she dared not name! Was the Fear to come into her life again; the Enemy that lurked and leered and forebore to strike, that hung upon her heels at every hour of the day, that sat down with her to her every occupation, that followed after when she stirred abroad, that came close to her in the still watches of the night, creeping, creeping to her bedside, looming over her in the darkness; the cold fingers reaching closer and closer, the awful face growing ever more distinct, till the suspense of waiting for the blow to fall, for the fingers to grip, became more than she could bear, and she sprang from her bed with a stifled sob of anguish, driven from her rest with quivering lips and streaming eyes?
Abruptly Lloyd rose to her feet, the flowers falling unheeded from her lap, her arms rigid at her side, her hands shut tight.
“No,” she murmured, “I cannot. This, at last, is more than I can do.”
Instantly Adler’s halting words went ringing through her brain: “The danger don’t figure; nothing in the world don’t figure. It’s his work.”
Adler’s words were the words of the world. She alone of the thousands whose eyes were turned toward Bennett was blinded. She was wrong. She belonged to him, but he did not belong to her. The world demanded him; the world called him from her side to do the terrible work that God had made him for. Was she, because she loved him, because of her own single anguish, to stand between him and the clamour of the world, between him and his work, between him and God?
A work there was for him to do. He must play the man’s part. The battle must be fought again. That horrible, grisly Enemy far up there to the north, upon the high curve of the globe, the shoulder of the world, huge, remorseless, terrible in its vast, Titanic strength, guarding its secret through all the centuries in the innermost of a thousand gleaming coils, must be defied again. The monster that defended the great prize, the object of so many fruitless quests must be once more attacked.
His was the work, for him the shock of battle, the rigour of the fight, the fierce assault, the ceaseless onset, the unfailing and unflinching courage.
Hers was the woman’s part. Already she had assumed it; steadfast unselfishness, renunciation, patience, the heroism greater than all others, that sits with folded hands, quiet, unshaken, and under fearful stress, endures, and endures, and endures. To be the inspiration of great deeds, high hopes, and firm resolves, and then, while the fight was dared, to wait in calmness for its issue — that was her duty, that, the woman’s part in the world’s great work.
Lloyd was dimly conscious of a certain sweet and subtle element in her love for Bennett that only of late she had begun to recognise and be aware of. This was a certain vague protective, almost maternal, instinct. Perhaps it was because of his present weakness both of body and character, or perhaps it was an element always to be found in the deep and earnest love of any noble-hearted woman. She felt that she, not as herself individually, but as a woman, was not only stronger than Bennett, but in a manner older, more mature. She was conscious of depths in her nature far greater than in his, and also that she was capable of attaining heights of heroism, devotion, and sacrifice which he, for all his masculine force, could not only never reach, but could not even conceive of. It was this consciousness of her larger, better nature that made her feel for Bennett somewhat as a mother feels for a son, a sister for her younger brother. A great tenderness mingled with her affection, a vast and almost divine magnanimity, a broad, womanly pity for his shortcomings, his errors, his faults. It was to her he must look for encouragement. It was for her to bind up and reshape the great energy that had been so rudely checked, and not only to call back his strength, but to guide it and direct into its appointed channels.
Lloyd returned toward the glass-enclosed veranda to find Bennett just arousing from his nap. She drew the shawls closer about him and rearranged the pillows under his head, and then sat down on the steps near at hand.
“Tell me about this Captain Duane,” she began. “Where is he now?”
Bennett yawned and passed his hand across his face, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“What time is it? I must have slept over an hour. Duane? Why, you saw what the paper said. I presume he is at Tasiusak.”
“Do you think he will succeed? Do you think he will reach the Pole? Adler thinks he won’t.”
“Oh, perhaps, if he has luck and an open season.”
“But tell me, why does he take so many men? Isn’t that contrary to the custom? I know a great deal about arctic work. While you were away I read every book I could get upon the subject. The best work has been done with small expeditions. If you should go again — when you go again, will you take so many? I saw you quoted somewhere as being in favour of only six or eight men.”
“Ten should be the limit — but some one else will make the attempt now. I’m out of it. I tried and failed.”
“Failed — you! The idea of you ever failing, of you ever giving up! Of course it was all very well to joke this morning about giving up your career; but I know you will be up and away again only too soon. I am trying to school myself to expect that.”
“Lloyd, I tell you that I am out of it. I don’t believe the Pole ever can be reached, and I don’t much care whether it is reached or not.”
Suddenly Lloyd turned to him, the unwonted light flashing in her eyes. “I do, though,” she cried vehemently. �
�It can be done, and we — America — ought to do it.”
Bennett stared at her, startled by her outburst.
“This English expedition,” Lloyd continued, the colour flushing in her cheeks, “this Duane-Parsons expedition, they will have the start of everybody next year. Nearly every attempt that is made now establishes a new record for a high latitude. One nation after another is creeping nearer and nearer almost every year, and each expedition is profiting by the experiences and observations made by the one that preceded it. Some day, and not very long now, some nation is going to succeed and plant its flag there at last. Why should it not be us? Why shouldn’t our flag be first at the Pole? We who have had so many heroes, such great sailors, such splendid leaders, such explorers — our Stanleys, our Farraguts, our Decaturs, our De Longs, our Lockwoods — how we would stand ashamed before the world if some other nation should succeed where we have all but succeeded — Norway, or France, or Russia, or England — profiting by our experiences, following where we have made the way!”
“That is very fine,” admitted Bennett. “It would be a great honour, the greatest perhaps; and once — I — well, I had my ambitions, too. But it’s all different now. Something in me died when — Dick — when — I — oh, let Duane try. Let him do his best. I know it can’t be done, and if he should win, I would be the first to wire congratulations. Lloyd, I don’t care. I’ve lost interest. I suppose it is my punishment. I’m out of the race. I’m a back number. I’m down.”
Lloyd shook her head.
“I don’t — I can’t believe you.”
“Do you want to see me go,” demanded Bennett, “after this last experience? Do you urge me to it?”
